AAS | Events | Fenner Conference 2007

Dr Graeme Pearman Graeme Pearman was Chief of CSIRO Atmospheric Research, 1992–2002. He contributed over 150 scientific papers, primarily on aspects of the global carbon budget. He now operates a consultancy company contracting to Monash University and to private and public sector organisations.

Graeme is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1988), the Royal Society of Victoria (1997) and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2005). He was awarded the CSIRO Medal (1988), a United Nation's Environment Program Global 500 Award (1989), Australian Medal of the Order of Australia (1999) and a Federation Medal (2003). He was recently science adviser to Al Gore during his visit to Australia.

His current activities include energy futures; sustainability science; scientific capacity building; public communication of science; and the role of science in modern societies.

I have been asked to make some summary comments on today's activities. We have had a very diverse set of presentations and a very wide range of views.

The following comments reflect my reading of the issues presented today. Kurt Lambeck reminded us that we have been talking about the issue of water for a long time. It is similar, in my view, to the issue of climate change itself. I was reflecting on this last year when Charles David Keeling died. He was a colleague of mine who made the first measurements of carbon dioxide and said we might have a problem, and one wondered what would have happened if he hadn't lived when he did. Certainly CSIRO would not have got into climate change at least for another decade or two – or perhaps they wouldn't be in it now – because his work stimulated a lot of the activities that we started 30 years ago in this particular area.

It also raises the issue that, after all, it was 1986 when the scientific community actually said, 'We think we've got a problem here: climate change looks like having the potential to be a problem for the whole community – not just for us in the scientific community, it's not just an academic problem.' You have to ask yourself whether we have really achieved much in the last 20 years. I think the same thing applies to water. And we want to break that nexus, we need to move forward so that we don't come back in another 10 or 20 years with even more serious problems.

John Williams argued very well that we need national resource considerations to be built into proper planning. This has not been the situation, and we have heard a number of examples today where that has not been the case. Indeed, the issue of population is at hand. Many of the attempts to consider what might be sustainable activities in parts of the country, attempts that are exemplary in their efforts, still exclude population. It is impossible to raise what is a difficult subject in current political and social circumstances. The question, 'Can we actually cope with the population growth and development that is occurring?', is largely put to one side. It simply needs to be on the agenda, and it needs to be more actively part of the considerations.

John Williams also mentioned that unless we are properly measuring water, we can't audit it and we can't really get a proper trading system in place.

Graeme Hugo said we need a population policy that takes into consideration economics and social, demographic and environmental issues. That isn't currently the case. Our population policy at the moment is particularly responsive to the view that as we build population size we increase markets, and that is good. It is important but it isn't the only factor, and I think Graeme is correct.

Roger Jones said that there were serious questions about how we generate and apply knowledge. I agree entirely with Roger. I think there are serious issues about how we generate knowledge, and it is not just the issue of generating it in a disciplinary base and then trying to use it in an interdisciplinary or integrated fashion. It is more than that. It is much more than that and much more complicated. Actually, many people who make decisions don't want information, and there is a rising movement around the world of the so-called 'non-reality' world, where people don't want to know what the reality is, because they can better manage the unreality by convincing people that a narrative about how the world is or might be that reflects informed views of what people wish to hear, is as satisfactory as a fragmented description of the world from experts about what best describes realty. These are serious problems for science, but also for the community at large.

Roger also said that what we do is to respond to stress, and I think that is very, very important. We probably all recognise this, but we need to keep saying it, because what he is really saying is that somehow we have got to get out of this habit of simply responding on a near-time basis. We have to cast our mind forward in time – several speakers talked about this – and try to envisage where we want to be, and then work back from that to ask, 'What are the things we need to do now, in order to get to where we want to be?' Built into that, because none of us can predict the future, is the concept of building resilience and thus being able to handle the fact that things will happen that we didn't predict. We need to build that in.

In the same vein it comes back to the question: if it rains this year, or within the next 12 months, around the nation, will we go back to where we were before? There was a bit of a discussion about this in the media a month or two back, when one of my ex-colleagues tried to remind the community that on the basis of his climate modelling he felt that these periods of long dry spells would occur from time to time – and some of the observational evidence suggests that – where we had extended periods of drought. He was trying to say that if one of these periods breaks, it doesn't deny the fact that climate-change science suggests we are going to have a drier climate anyhow. What we don't want to do is to get back to reacting on the basis of the immediacy of the fact that we have got water back. Many of the people here have reminded us that even if we do receive higher rainfall, it is going to take years to fill the dams and replenish the reserves that we had, for at least parts of the country.

Barney Foran alerted us to the real levels of water use; the issue of virtual water. I do think this is very important. When we have a glass of wine each evening, the amount of water embodied in that glass (in its production) is large, outweighing that which many of us use in our households in a day. It's sobering to remember that there are all sorts of things we do that go beyond whether we take a glass of water to drink it, to things that we do in our community in which water is effectively embodied. I think it's important, and Barney gave us some fascinating figures about how that really works in our society.

Kim Russell spoke about possible technical actions on the ground, things that some of us with more academic interests have not considered. Through the Australian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage a lot of technical changes, positive changes, have been made to try to address some of the problems.

John Langford said the progress on water has been punctuated by drought. It comes back to the same theme again: we don't react until there is a crisis. Can we get out of that cycle? That is consistent with what Roger Jones was saying.

John also said that there are a lot of distortions, by the management practices we have and the way water is managed and shared, and in the way investment could be made in management rather than in infrastructure. There are serious questions about whether the money would be best put into infrastructure or management, and he suggests that management is more important. It is easy to decide to build another dam; it is not so easy to decide on an alternative way of either using or delivering water.

Dick Gross headed up a very interesting panel of people whom I don't normally meet – speaking about the practical issues of dealing with water at a regional government level. This raised many potential opportunities and issues.

Jon Black said that without substantial precipitation, south-east Queensland would run out of water by, as I think he said, December of next year, and this just underscored the kinds of comments that John Williams and also John Langford had made about the severity of our current situation. We are close to crisis point with regard to water supply.

Paddi Creevey talked about an old stamping ground of mine when I was a young person. Mandurah (a village when I lived there). It is just incredible to see what has happened. Of course, that kind of development has happened up the east coast of Australia as well, and it is happening on the coast of Victoria in many places, but perhaps no more in a percentage-wise way than it is in Mandurah. She spoke about the fact that there are critical resource problems; people with the expertise to handle some of these things particularly for local governments. This was a view expressed by several people. Either we are not training them, or they are being attracted to other sectors of the community and this sector can't compete. There were even discussions about whether we can compete across borders for some of these skills, with employment growth being different across states and across borders.

Paddi and others spoke about institutional clumsiness. This reflects one point that I would emphasise from my presentation. My view is that we have no guarantee at this stage that we know how to deal with issues as large and complex as climate change and water futures. I am a great optimist but in moments of pessimism about these issues my concern is whether we have the right management frameworks internationally, nationally and locally to handle these kinds of problems, because of their complexity, not only in terms of the science but also in the way they interface with the community.

Robert Bell talked about the national activity; I saw his comments as being positive. But he talked also about timing issues, and this emphasises that it is no good waiting until you actually have a crisis, because then you are exposed over long time scales. From my own perspective as a climate scientist, this is the problem with climate change. If you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it stays there for 80 years. So it is no good waiting until you have got too much there. You have to respond earlier. And the same applies to issues like water supply and water utilisation – you have to be strategic about how you treat the risk of actually running out. There is, I think, a fair amount of evidence that until now we haven't been sufficiently strategic.

David Butt said that he felt the national reform process would be a help. But there had to be change and he could not see that the way we have been doing things was the way to go forward. And there's a list of reasons for that. There are demographic issues, there are economic issues, there is climate change and so on.

There were several mentions of the need for change in the costing of water. Comparing the issue of virtual water, we also have virtual energy. Almost everything we do or produce has energy and water embedded in it by virtue of the production process. When we cost things we rarely appropriately cost this energy or water. There are also serious questions about how quickly society can change to include such costings. Carbon trading will be an attempt to introduce costings for carbon emitted, allowing the market to handle this externality in the cost of energy. But we will need the same kinds of approaches, I think, from the water point of view and perhaps also for biodiversity.

Those are just a few of my impressions from today's discussion. I have found it absolutely fascinating; I hope you feel the same.

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